AMD Radeon HD 7970 Review: 28nm And Graphics Core Next, Together As One
by Ryan Smith on December 22, 2011 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
- AMD
- Radeon
- ATI
- Radeon HD 7000
Display Tech: HD3D Eyefinity, MST Hubs, & DDM Audio
With the launch of the HD 5000 series back in 2009 AMD managed to get the drop on everyone, press and NVIDIA alike. Eyefinity, AMD’s Single Large Surface technology, came out of virtually nowhere thanks to a carefully orchestrated development plan that ensured very few people even within AMD knew about it. As a result of everything that was leaked ahead of time Eyefinity was not, making it AMD’s big eye catcher for the 5000 series.
As what was to be the first piece of the much dreamed about holodeck, AMD has been steadily working on it since 2009 in order to improve the experience even within their existing hardware by adding support for such features as bezel compensation and combining CrossFire with Eyefinity. For AMD it’s a feature of great importance even if end user adoption is still limited.
For the Southern Islands family AMD isn’t going to be pulling quite the rabbit out of their hat this time when it comes to displays. Southern Islands’ new display feature will be Discrete Digital Multi-Point Audio (which we’ll get to in a moment), but this doesn’t mean that AMD hasn’t continued to work on Eyefinity. Since October AMD has been engaged in an initiative they’re calling “Eyefinity Technology 2.0”, which is going to be pushed as a big part of the Southern Islands launch even though these are software improvements that will benefit all cards.
So what is Eyefinity Technology 2.0 composed of? We’ve already seen several new features starting with Catalyst 11.10, such as 5x1 portrait and landscape support and flexible bezel compensation support. The next step is going to be integrating Stereo 3D (or as AMD likes to call it, HD3D) into the mix, similar to how NVIDIA has 3D Vision Surround. Catalyst 11.12 introduced the ability to use HD3D with an Eyefinity display setup, and Catalyst 12.1 (preview out now) added support to do that in a CrossFire configuration. The final step is going to be with Catalyst 12.2 in February, which will add support for custom resolutions and the ability to relocate the Windows task bar to an arbitrary screen, two features that users have been asking about for quite some time. Again, all of these improvements are driver side, but they are a major component of AMD’s marketing for Southern Islands.
Speaking about Eyefinity, one issue that comes up time and time again is Multi Stream Transport (MST) hubs. We were introduced to MST hubs back with the launch of the 6800 series, which allowed a single DP 1.2 port to drive up to 4 monitors by taking advantage of the high bandwidth of DP1.2 and embedding transport streams for several monitors into the signal. The purpose of MST hubs was so that users could use several monitors with a regular Radeon card, rather than needing an exotic all-DisplayPort “Eyefinity edition” card as they need now.
But as many of you have asked me about, several deadlines for MST hubs have come and gone, including the latest deadline which was supposed to be by the end of this year. As with active DP adaptors this is largely out of AMD’s hands since they don’t produce the hardware, but they have been continuing to prod their partners on the issue. The latest deadline from AMD isn’t rosy – summer of 2012 – but they seem more confident of this deadline than deadlines in the past. Not that another half-year wait will be of any comfort for users who have been looking for MST hubs for the better part of the year, but at least it provides some idea on when to expect them.
Last, but certainly not least on the display technologies front is AMD’s new feature for Southern Islands, Discrete Digital Multi-Point Audio (DDMA). It’s a mouthful of a name but the concept is rather simple: it’s the next step in audio output from a video card. Video cards have been able to output audio for a few years now via HDMI, and more recently DisplayPort gained the ability. However GPUs have been limited to streaming audio to a single device, be it a monitor, TV, or receiver. With DDMA GPUs can send audio to multiple devices, and AMD is looking at how to put that ability to work.
The most basic use for being able to send audio to multiple devices is to individually address the speakers of each device, which is the cornerstone of AMD’s proposed use cases. Fundamentally AMD is looking at applications that involve matching audio streams to the monitor the relevant application is on – move a video player from your center monitor to your left monitor, and the audio from that video player should also move from the speakers on the middle monitor to the speakers on the left monitor. What can you do with speakers that are mapped to monitors? That’s what AMD wants to find out.
Being realistic for a moment, the 7970 isn’t going to be the card that sells this feature, as it’s a $550 gamer video card. Gamers are using dedicated 2.1/5.1/7.1 audio systems or headphones for surround sound, and while AMD does have a proposed multi-tasking use case for this it’s not very convincing. DDMA will become much more important on future lower end cards as those are the cards that go into family desktops, workstations, and the like. Thus the killer app for this feature (and certainly AMD’s best prepared scenario) is for video conferencing where each attendee is mapped to a monitor, and with DDMA a set of speakers on that monitor. AMD’s partner Oovoo is working on just such a system though it’s still early in development.
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Ananke - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link
"The 7970 leads the 5870 by 50-60% here and in a number of other games"...and as I see it also carries 500-600% of price premium over the 5870.Meh, this is so so priced for a FireGL card, but very badly placed for a consumer market. Regardless, CUDA is getting more open meanwhile. AMD is still several generations/years behind in the HPC market and marketing a product above the NVidia price targets will not help AMD to make it popular.
Having say so, I am using ATI cards for gaming for several years already, and I am very pleased with their IQ and performance. I have always pre-purchased my ATI cards... What I am missing though is teh promised and never materialized consumer level software that can utilize its calculation ability, aka CyberLink and other video transcoders. If it was not for the naughty Nvidia power draw in the 5th series, I would've gone green to have CUDA. Hence, considering SO MUCH MONEY, I am waiting at least 6 months from now to see what the prices will be for the both new contenders in next GPU architectures :).
Dangerous_Dave - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link
Seems like AMD can't do anything right these days. Bulldozer was designed for a world that doesn't exist, and now we have this new GPU stinking up the place. I'm sorry but @28nm you have double the transistors per area compared with @40nm, yet the performance is only 30% better for a chip that is virtually the same size! It should be at least twice as far ahead of the 6970 as that, even on immature drivers. As it stands, AMD @ 28nm is only just ahead of Nvidia @ 40nm as far as minimums go (the only thing that matters).I shudder to think how badly AMD is going to get destroyed when Nvidia release their 28nm GPU.
Finally - Friday, December 23, 2011 - link
I shudder to think how badly one Nvidia fanboy's ego is going to get scratched if team red released a better GPU and his favourite team has nothing to offer.Oh... they did?
CeriseCogburn - Thursday, March 8, 2012 - link
We have to let amd "go first" now since they have been so on the brink of bankruptcy collapse for so long that they've had to sell off most of their assets... and refinance by AbuDhabi oil money...I think it's nice our laws and global economy puts pressure on the big winners to not utterly crush the underdogs...
Really, if amd makes another fail it might be the last one before collapse and "restructuring" and frankly not many of us want to see that...
They already made the "last move" a dying company does and slashed with the ax at their people...
If the amd fans didn't constantly demand they be given a few dollars off all the time, amd might not be failing - I mean think about it - a near constant loss, because the excessive demand for price vs perf vs the enemy is all the radeon fans claim to care about.
It would be better for us all if the radeon fans dropped the constant $ complaints and just manned up and supported AMD as real fans, with their pocketbooks... instead of driving their favorite toward bankruptcy and cooked books filled with red ink...
Dangerous_Dave - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link
On reflection this card is even worse than my initial analysis. For 3.4billion transistors AMD could have done no research at all and simply integrated two 6870s onto a single die (a la 5870 vs 4870) and ramped up the clock speed to somewhere over 1Ghz (since 28nm would have easily allowed that). This would have produced performance similar to a 6990, and far in excess of the 7970.Instead we've done a lot of research and spent 4.1billion transistors creating a card that is far worse than a 6990!
That's the value of AMD's creative thinking.
cknobman - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link
The sad part is your likely too stupid to realize just how idiotic your post sounds.They introduced a new architecture that facilitates much better compute performance as well as giving more gaming performance.
Did you read the article and look at the compute benchmarks or did you just flip through the game benchmark pages and look at numbers without reading?
Zingam - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link
Or maybe you just don't realize that they've added another 2 billion transistors for minimal graphics performance increase over the previous generation.That's almost as if you buy a new generation BMW that has instead 300 hp, 600hp but is not able to drag a bigger trailer.
The only benefit for you would be that you can brag that you've just got the most expensive and useless car available.
Finally - Friday, December 23, 2011 - link
Rule 1A:The frequency of a car pseudoanalogy to explain a technical concept increases with thread length. This will make many people chuckle, as computer people are rarely knowledgeable about vehicular mechanics.
cknobman - Friday, December 23, 2011 - link
Holy sh!t are you not reading and understanding the article and posts here??????????The extra transistors and new architecture were to increase COMPUTE PERFORMANCE as well as graphics.
Think bigger picture here dude not just games. Think of fusion and how general computing and graphics computing will merge into one.
This architecture is much bigger than just being a graphics card for games.
This is AMD's fermi except they did it about 100x better than Nvidia keeping power in check and still having amazing performance.
Plus your looking at probably beta drivers (heck maybe alpha) so there could very will be another 10+% increase in performance once this thing hit retail shelves and gets some driver improvements.
CeriseCogburn - Thursday, March 8, 2012 - link
I see. So when nvidia did it, it was abandoning gamers for 6 months of ripping away and gnawing plus... but now, since it's amd, amd has done it 100X better... and no abandonment...Wow.
I love hypocrisy in it's full raw and massive form - it's an absolute wonder to behold.